


Jeeves and the Nightside

by Not_You



Series: Not_You's Pandemic Follies [3]
Category: Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: Blood Drinking, Declarations Of Love, Demons, First Kiss, Halloween, House Party, Lovecraftian Monster(s), M/M, Mild Blood, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-02-23 08:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23542237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_You/pseuds/Not_You
Summary: As requested by Irina1492: Jeeves has a secret magical ability, and he's extremely worried about Bertie finding out about it.
Relationships: Reginald Jeeves/Bertram "Bertie" Wooster
Series: Not_You's Pandemic Follies [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683655
Comments: 23
Kudos: 63





	Jeeves and the Nightside

Apparently, there really _are_ a lot of awful thingummies going bump in the night and all that. This Wooster would not have been prone to believing in such things, were it not for bitter, bitter experience. All these Hallowe’en festivities are good fun, but I cannot help but get some very inappropriate chills up my spine these days at completely benign scenes. Everyone will be having a fine time bobbing for apples, and then there I am, all over cold sweat. At least Jeeves understands. After all, he was there.

The scene of the action was one of those drafty old country houses that really ought to be banned. I was down there for an autumnal binge thrown by some friend of a friend of Oofy Prosser’s, and everything was right enough at the start. There was cider and various traditional games involving apples, and the company was merry and the night outside lit by what’s called a harvest moon. I had acquired a very good costume, a red devil number that looked much better than the time Gussie Fink-Nottle tried it. I would never in my life wear such a thing today, but the reason for that comes later. At the start I was fooling about with all the rest of them. I was playing something on the piano, maybe ‘Forty-Seven Ginger-Headed Sailors.’ All I remember is that it was some kind of comic song, and that I had just heard the strike of midnight through the music when it all began.

I asked Jeeves about it later, and he informed me that anything good that bumps in the night does so in the fifteen minutes before midnight. Malign presences have the fifteen minutes after, and they certainly made the most of it that night.

Jeeves has done his best to explain it since, telling me all about thinning of the veil between worlds and other mystical things. He has assured me that the chances of such a thing happening twice in any one mortal lifetime is next to nil, but I still get very nervous at times and places where the veil is thin. And it gets a bit thin at any Hallowe’en party. But that night, good Lord, did things get thick when the veil got thin. Apparently, down in South America and places like that, there are native shaman chappies who, on purpose, eat all sorts of toxic plants that make them see terrible things. What happened at midnight was bit like that, I hear, with melting walls and breathing floors. That part wasn’t so bad, and not so far out of line with what happens when one takes enough marihuana. The part that was bad was when the demons arrived.

It’s more than a reminder of terrifying experience that keeps me from wearing a devil suit to a costume party again as long as I live. After that night, the familiar red devil is just embarrassing. The obscenity and horror of the creatures that crawled out of every crack, crevice, and corner of the room is beyond words, but I shall do my best. They were like smoke, if smoke was completely solid and somehow made entirely of bad intentions. They had claws without hands and eyes without faces and mouths without bodies and the whole thing was utterly beastly. Just looking at them made me feel about halfway to the loony bin, and the rest of the party seemed to share that opinion, women shrieking, men vomiting, servants of both sexes running at top speed into walls and tables and the horrible certainty that we would all soon be worse than dead, that the things would somehow get their nasty, greasy grip on our immortal souls.

The first thing I thought of the tumult of horror was Jeeves. At the time I had not yet disclosed to the man my tender pash for him, and let it be said that when those wretched demons gave me a feeling for my immortal soul, it sort of threw a spotlight on what really is evil and what isn’t, and I realised that the p. in question was most definitely not evil in and of itself. And if we were all to be torn asunder and worse than dead and all these terrible things, I should find my man and tell him that I loved him.

The room had gotten all turned round and obscured somehow, and so I couldn’t find my way to the kitchen door. I started to cry, then, because I wanted Jeeves so desperately and it wasn’t fair that we should have to die apart. I stopped by what might have been the mantelpiece, and leaned there, doing my best not to vomit or shriek, which left nothing whatever to stop the tears.

The sudden change in the room a moment later is even harder to describe than the condition it was in before. Like a shadow over shadows and a storm inside a storm, Jeeves was there. He swept into the room in a cascade of black fire, and I was amazed that none of us were burned. He somehow screamed terribly without making a sound, and I covered my ears even though it did no good. The vibrations were horrid, and I felt them from the soles of my feet to the roots of my teeth and the sockets of my eyes. Jeeves shrieked and slashed in some formless, impossible way, and after either three minutes or three hours, everything cleared the room. Everyone else had fainted by this point, so Jeeves and I were the last men standing.

I had never seen my paragon so disheveled or bewildered. I had barely ever seen him evince either of those moods at all, and now here they both were. His uniform hung off of him in useless tatters, and even in my numb shock I was alive to the possibility of seeing more of my man than I ever had. His torso was the beautiful piece of work one might have been expecting, all broad shoulders and hairy chest. I’ve never been able to grow anything of real account there, myself, but each of us has his cross to bear. It was at the waist that everything began to go wrong. 

At each of Jeeves’s furred hips was what looked like a big, staring eye, and from where a person’s navel usually is to the top of the pubic bone were rings of tentacles around his body. They looked like undersea thingummies, and were covered in suckers. Jeeves always had moved with feline grace, but even with that odd, catlike legs and the big, black, pantherlike paws came as rather a shock. Really, there was more claw exposed than on a cat’s paw, so the whole affair was more like a gryphon’s talon, or one of those feet on bathtubs that clutch a brass ball.

“I say, Jeeves,” was the first thing I could manage. I followed that up with, “Thank you very much,” because it seemed only polite. I knew he had done better than save my life and that of everyone else present, and the poor chap looked positively done in. He was wobbling on his paws, and when I thanked him he covered his face in his hands and to my utter horror, began to cry. “Jeeves!” I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder. “Jeeves, it’s all right!” He said something in a language that didn’t sound human, and then started going on and on in English about how he was a hideous monster and I shouldn’t soil my hands with him and he would just go and all sorts of other wrong-headed nonsense.

“Jeeves!” I bellowed at last, “You are a good man and I love you!” There was a long silence, and I closed my eyes and forced myself to be clear. “As in, would walk you down the aisle if such a thing were legal. You have just saved everyone here from I don’t even want to know what. You are my man and I love you and if you want to resign because of that, go right ahead, but don’t leave me because you think you’re awful for some reason!”

“I’m the same as the things that nearly destroyed everyone here, sir.” He was hugging himself, probably chilled in the scraps of his clothes.

“It’s not as if every Englishman is one to be proud of,” I said, and then had to sit down on the floor, because my legs wouldn’t hold me anymore. Everything was just too strange. 

I closed my eyes and rested my face in my hands. I heard Jeeves take a deep breath, and then all of reality sort of shimmered. When I looked up again, we were alone, the room was in order and Jeeves was properly dressed again. He still looked exhausted and scared, and even though he hadn’t said anything about my declaration, I went up to him and took his hand. I couldn’t stop myself, and this lack of control was rewarded when Jeeves laced our fingers together.

“Where is everyone?” I asked, and he smiled slightly.

“I sent them to bed, sir.” I just nodded, because I wasn't certain what else to do, and Jeeves smiled at me. “Bertram,” he said softly, and my own name had never sounded so beautiful to me before, “I should very much like to go home.”

I agreed, and reality shimmered again. Somehow, I wasn’t even surprised that Jeeves could transport us instantly back to our flat. I was glad to be there, and beyond glad to still be holding his hand. We both spent a moment just looking around the place, feeling how calm and clean and quiet it was, and then Jeeves sat me on the sofa and poured us each a stiff drink. He handed me my glass, and then sighed, looking unbearably sad.

“Bertram, you said you loved me, before.”

“That’s because I do, old thing.” I took half of my drink in one gulp and felt slightly better able to cope with my new reality.

“Even though I am a creature of the Nightside, profane to the marrow of my silver bones?”

I gave this a moment of serious thought, and then said, “Yes, I do. You’ve always been a little wicked, Jeeves, now it just makes more sense. I shouldn’t keep just calling you Jeeves. Should it be Reginald, now?” He actually shuddered in revulsion, so I supposed that was wrong. I patted the sofa for him to sit beside me, and he did.

“My true name is nothing you can or should pronounce, but Jeeves is much closer to the droning, insect sound of it.”

“Very well, Jeeves. Are you feeling all right, after so much exertion? And, of course, do you, you know, love the young master back, and all that sort of thing?”

“Bertram, I love you so much that I am ashamed to ask for a drop of your pure blood for this drink, even though it would do me good.”

Of course I obliged him. Just one drop of blood, for all the work he had done! It was ridiculous, and when I told him so he just stared at me like he couldn’t believe it. He fetched a pin, disinfected it, and insisted on sticking me himself. He probably did do a better job of it than I would have. It barely hurt, and I shivered all over, watching his intent expression as he slid the pin into the skin of the tip of my left ring finger. It barely hurt at all, and he slipped the pin out again, turning my hand over and putting his glass under it. One red drop fell into the golden liquor, and he swirled it into oblivion. When the blood was invisible, he drained the glass. I could see the color coming back to his face, and I smiled.

“Better, Jeeves?”

“Much better,” he whispered, and set the empty glass down, turning to me and cupping my face in one hand. “Bertram, may I kiss you?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” I told him, and leaned in to close the gap between us.

There was something different about kissing Jeeves, but I wouldn’t have guessed that he wasn’t human from it. The whole experience was so pleasant that I climbed into his lap to keep it going, and every second he held me felt like it was shaving off some of the nightmares I would have later.

So no, I can’t really enjoy Hallowe’en anymore, but I am not without affection for the holiday.


End file.
